美国公共债务突破40万亿美元，多国财政纪律面临考验

David Westin: This is "Wall Street Week." I'm David Westin, bringing you stories of capitalism. It's become the summer of the long bond as Treasury Secretary Bessent stepped in to try to keep rising yields in check. But it's the Fed's effect on the bond market that is front and center as Kevin Warsh gives his first address to the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium as Fed chair. We go behind the scenes of where the central bankers meet every summer in the wealthiest county in the United States.

Plus social media is storming the citadel of Hollywood studios. Creators going straight from YouTube to the silver screen are sometimes beating the big guys at their own game. But we start with the story about doing the right thing no matter what the consequences are. Last week U.S. public debt crossed the $40 trillion mark. And it's not just the United States with the debt problem. Countries around the world have borrowed heavily since the COVID pandemic, posing a difficult choice of whether to pay sooner or face much worse consequences when they're forced to pay later.

As our special correspondent Chrystia Freeland tells us, fiscal discipline has many benefits, but also some very real costs for those making the tough decisions. -In the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Japan, the pressure is on. -It's the bond market that has now taken over as the anchor, the great limitation. -Today, all but two countries in the G7 spend more money paying interest on their national debt than they spend on defense.

And in the U.S., the surging debt has pushed bond yields near multi-decade highs. -After deficit spending, you got to rein the deficits back in. That's the step that's not happening. -Robin Brooks is an economist at the Brookings Institution. -We've never had a synchronized debt binge the way that we had in 2020 and 2021. So some of what we're seeing now in debt markets is kind of the payback for that experiment. The flip side to that, Chrystia, is small economies that have managed their debt really well, take Switzerland or Sweden, these places have debt to GDP, around 30% or 40% of GDP.

They are the safe havens of choice for global markets. -This is where leadership is required, and having a little bit of backbone. -I wanted to talk with the people who, from Robin Brooks' perspective, got it right. How did they do it? What did it cost them? And what can other countries learn from them about making the tough choices that economists and investors say are necessary? Japan is in trouble too. -Yeah, correct. -Sigrid Kaag became Finance Minister of the Netherlands in 2022.

And she was one of the key people who brought her government spending back down after the pandemic. So Sigrid, you and I have the shared experience of being progressive politicians, finance ministers who had to spend a lot of money to get through COVID, who were finance ministers of triple A economies, and then had to bring the plane back down. Do you remember making that decision? Was it hard? -Um, I do. I think what was the harder part is that we actually had to start to sort of socialize the idea again that we were going to have to cut our expenses.

That was as if I was violating the church, the synagogue and the mosque all in one. And there's a fabled expression I used at one stage where I told the audience, it was held against me very much, funnily enough, by the even more progressive parties when I said, "We have to accept that, collectively, "due to our current expenditure patterns, "we'll collectively become a little bit poorer, "meaning tighten our belts a little bit, "preserve the space for those that are most needed, "build and reinforce the social safety valves "that we need for a certain part of our population, "and then also be more frugal, and more disciplined, "and more discerning "in where we spend and what we spend it on." -Today, the debt in the Netherlands is around 40% of GDP, a level most economists would consider very manageable.

As a comparison, in the U.S., the national debt is about 120% of GDP. And why was that fiscal responsibility so important to you? Why did you think that that was in the Dutch national interest? -Well, there's a cultural element, as you know, the Netherlands is a Calvinist country. So it likes to always consider, I'm a Catholic, but it's a Calvinist country in political culture as well as social culture. So frugality, stewardship, but also guarding what you have in order to be able to transmit it to future generations.

But secondly, for me, it was common sense. You know, if it's your household budget, too, you can't keep spending and be surprised you've got nothing left. -Kaag says she approached fiscal responsibility from the political left, rather than from the right. A responsible budget meant more money in the future for things that mattered most to her party. Education, the green transition, social infrastructure, long term investments made possible by the promise of spending less money, paying off debt down the road. -We reduced our expenditure marginally.

And the marginal cut was harder than actually the bigger cuts that followed, because it was breaking a trend. It was changing behavior, basically, and managing expectations. So the discipline, I think, is also in the leadership exercise. Be calm about it, and do it, and let the budget then be judged. And then you've got to defend it, of course, as you know more than anyone. -You might remember I said all but two G7 countries spend more money paying interest on their national debt than they do on defense.

One of those two is my home country of Canada, where I served as finance minister during and after COVID. The other is a lot closer to Sigrid Kaag, a much larger economy whose national debt is around 60% of GDP. So we spoke with the man in charge of getting Germany's finances back on track after the COVID era spending boom, Christian Lindner. Tell me what it was like to try to bring spending back under control. What were you thinking in those days? -Well, Chrystia, public finances are not ruined in times of crises.

They are ruined if we fail to exit the crisis management efforts. And there is a temptation. If public debt is cheap or has no visible price, you can hardly explain colleagues in cabinet or the public opinion why you should stop further spending. Too often fiscal space is misunderstood as a kind of invitation. But it is not. Fiscal space, in my view, is an asset we have to preserve to deal with crises. -That view is one that's shared by Sigrid Kaag, and also by me.

But on top of being like-minded finance ministers who helped bring our countries' debts back under control after the pandemic, 3 of us have something else in common. Not one of us is still a finance minister today. Do you think you paid a political price, personally? -I think I paid a price in different levels, I would say. First of all, and I think that's quite well studied, it's evidence-based, progressive women leaders are given-- cut less slack.

That's just a fact. I think also because I was a messenger, I think still of sound policy, you become a target unwittingly. But I don't regret the choice because I know looking back, and looking at where we stand now with our debt and deficit levels, one of the lowest in Europe, sustained triple A rating, and we sustained the investments where they were needed on climate action, greening the economy, as well as education pillars. -You ultimately paid a political price for that view.

Do you feel like you made the right decision? Would you do it again? -Yes, I would do it again. And there hadn't been a real alternative. Well, I was convinced that further spending is not the right choice to make policy-wise. But in the situation in which I was, there was legally no alternative. Afterwards, a new government changed the basic law in that regard. But the situation was different when I had to make my decisions. -Jean-Claude Juncker famously liked to say, "We all know the r